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Sunday, November 6, 2016

Review of THE WONDER by Emma Donoghue

3.5 Stars

In the 1850s, a few years after the Great
Potato Famine in Ireland, Lib Wright, a Florence Nightingale-trained nurse,
arrives in a small village in the Irish Midlands. Hired by a committee of prominent residents,
she is tasked with keeping watch over 11-year-old Anna O'Donnell
who apparently has not eaten for four months.
Along with Sister Michael, a quiet nun, Lib's task is to determine if
Anna is a miracle or a fraud. Lib is
skeptical from the beginning and expects to solve the mystery quickly but she
discovers no secret feeding. Anna's
physical condition worsens and Lib is faced with an ethical dilemma: Is her vigilance keeping Anna from eating and
so possibly leading to her death?

Lib is an interesting woman who grows in the
course of the novel. She considers
science to be "the most magical force" (210) and has little patience
for the religious beliefs and superstitious folklore of the people she
encounters. She has a definite prejudice
against the Irish. She thinks of Anna as
"a trickster, a great liar in a country famous for them" (73). Later she summarizes her feelings for
them: "What a rabble, the
Irish. Shiftless, thriftless, hopeless,
hapless, always brooding over past wrongs" (147). Lib doesn't want to be thought of as
"the Englishwoman too high-and-mighty" (99) but that is what she
is. Her attitude of superiority is
shaken when she is told about the role of the English in the famine: "'Half the country wouldn't have died if
the landlords hadn't kept shipping away the corn, seizing cattle, rack-renting,
evicting, torching cabins . . . Or if the government in Westminster hadn't
thought it the most prudent course of action to sit on their arses and let the
Irish starve'" (165). Eventually, after
learning she has been wrong in several of her assumptions, she admits she was "blinkered
by prejudice" (191).

The author suggests that Lib's prejudice
accounts for her errors in judgement, but that explanation I did not find
totally convincing. Sometimes she just
seems unobservant, something that is the exact opposite of what she has been
trained to be: "exact and careful"
(65). Her blindness to Pat's fate is an
example as is her not seeing what is happening to Anna. She, a trained, professional nurse, must be
told by a newspaper reporter what should have been obvious; that reporter,
William Byrne, even asks Lib, "'Are you blind?'" (184).

Most of the minor characters are
detestable. They seem interested in
having Anna declared a saint, "'Ireland's first saint canonized since the
thirteenth century'" (239), so she will be a source of income as pilgrims
come to see the miracle girl. Anna's
doctor, who sees himself as a great science discoverer, suggests his patient's
persistent chilliness might suggest that her metabolism is "'altering to
one less combustive, more of a reptilian than mammalian nature'"
(195). Anna is the foil for virtually
all of the residents. She is a sweet, loving,
innocent child who is invariably cheerful.
Just like Lib does, the reader comes to care for Anna, especially when
it becomes clear that she has been the victim of men's behaviour in many ways.

There is certainly suspense throughout which
will keep the reader turning pages. There
are many questions to which one craves answers:
Is Anna being fed by someone? Why
is she choosing to fast? Should
religious beliefs take precedence over the welfare of a child? What can Lib do to prevent Anna's death? The novel's atmosphere certainly adds to the
suspense: the majority of the scenes are
in Anna's bedroom or on the peat bogs which possess "'the eerie power of
keeping things as they were at the moment of immersion . . . [including] the
occasional body in a remarkable state of preservation'" (164). There is a claustrophobic feeling
throughout. The religious fundamentalism
is suffocating and so is the amount of control the men in the community
exert.

There is a distraction, however, that mars the
novel. A romance develops that has a
handsome man coming to the rescue at a crucial time. He is even seen riding off into the
sunset: "Lib looked back over her
shoulder and saw the scene for a moment as if in a painting. Horse and riders, the trees, the fading
streaks in the west" (277).

The ending, too, is problematic. It is too pat, too Hollywood. The past cannot be left behind very easily;
Lib should know this from her own life, and Anna is certainly tormented by the
past.

I've read several of Donoghue's novels and
have enjoyed them. I also enjoyed this
one - until about the last 50 pages.

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― Jane Austen

About Me

I'm a retired English teacher/teacher-librarian who, after 30 years, left the classroom and became a copyeditor and book reviewer. Reading has always been my passion and now, in our new home, I have, thanks to my husband, the library of my dreams. For many years, before I retired and moved, I belonged to THE Timmins Book Club which is one of the oldest in North America, with minutes dating back to 1938; I submitted an article about us and it was featured on the LitLovers.com website: http://www.litlovers.com/featured-clubs/timmins-book-club. Now I'm trying to start a global book club of sorts with my blog: http://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/.